Blog Content: Values and Strategy

I want this blog to be open-ended. I don’t want to make content for a defined goal, in the traditional sense of writing to serve the audience of a niche. I want my “niche” to be my fascination with how connections happen online… or basically whatever makes me think, and I’m a pretty eclectic person. This poses certain problems when it comes to defining a content development goal. As Jennifer Osborne said in part two of her Blog Strategy series, “A strategy is the plan for achieving a defined goal. A tactic is the “doing” part of the strategy.” There are some key words in there: plan; defined; goal and strategy. Planning is difficult without defined goals.

Defining goals and objectives gives plans a frame of reference that allows for assessment, polishing and re-polishing. A goal might be to write a blog post two or three times a week, but is posting enough? I want my content to go deeper than facts about topics. I want to connect. How?

I think there are levels of engagement that can be inspired by the qualities of blog content.

Levels of Readership Engagement

Level 1. Regular Posting Simply writing a blog post twice a week is not enough of a goal to be interesting or productive, to myself or, probably, to a readership. We’ve all seen and written posts that don’t say much or do much, and they may have their place. However, the posts that engender engagement are a different animal.

Level 2. Content With a Strategy I’d be getting closer to engagement with a plan to write a one- or two-page post, twice a week, that will help me get the word out about a specific topic. The difference is that I’d be trying to “get the word out” about “something specific.” Is word getting “out,” or does it stop at my blog? Which posts work? Looking at why things develop helps a blog improve. Keyword strategy becomes possible here, as concrete terms start to be investigated more broadly.

Level 3. Value There’s still a missing piece: why do I care, and why should the reader care? Specifically, why is this one- to two-page post going to be valuable, and what values are fed by this post? When someone who writes intelligently is also writing from a place of values, their material is more interesting and useful, and I am more likely to be engaged. If the reader is lucky, the writer is also brave enough to share personal insight, and insightful enough to have it in the first place. My belief is that this is where branding starts to become more than slapping a logo in the header: there is at least some identity behind the content. With identity behind the content, readers are given a window through which to identify with the blog.

Level 4. Stewardship of a Readership A smart, practiced writer or blog content manager will support the creative vulnerability of level 3. If they’re good, they take care of another set of priorities above and beyond the twice a week one- to two-page post: care and feeding of the readership. Give readers what they expect, generally when they expect, and them give them something extra – get to know them, promote them, promote to them. Make friends. Be friends. Mean it. Shake hands.

Level 5. Being Community Community is bigger than what happens withing the private garden of a blog or a forum. True community includes a relationship between the smaller world of whatever happens on the site, and the wider world of the rest of a readership’s lives and interests. Community is when link building strategies and reader stewardship tactics quit being part of the development plan and start to feel like natural outgrowths of the character of a place.

Thoughts About Blog Content Promotion

Keyword strategy on its own is good for about levels 1 and 2. Crappy link bait might get to level 2 1/2. Friends who already have a connection with the writer will help out at level 2. A readership will evangelize at levels 4 and 5, which also helps organically created, keyword-rich link text to have real value. I doubt that so-called “viral” is possible without some level 5 type community in place to help circulate ideas.

You may have noticed that I just skipped level 3. I think that sometimes marketers do, too.

  • What marketing is not. Marketing is like the connective tissue of the Internet. It is not the heart and soul, and it cannot circulate lifeblood; it can promote – mimic lifeblood – in the same way a heart-lung machine can keep a human body physically alive. Marketing cannot create the natural circulation of ideas.
  • People socialize and circulate ideas. Marketing builds conduits that attempt to move products and services. Social media provides conduits that attempt to foster a sense of community. Conduits are only conduits. Infrastructure is only infrastructure. People move the lifeblood, the opinions, interests and ideas.
  • People need community and identity. Community helps us trust and want to communicate. Identity helps us empathize, gives us something to hang a hat on, interpret difference between the party hat, the floppy sunhat and the classic stetson. IMHO the lynch pin of getting information listened to and associated with the source happens at level 3 – value, value and a brand identity with some soul in it.

Setting a Blogging Objective

Content is not visible without promotion, and promotion is not effective without an objective that is connected to a specific, quantifiable goal… so here goes.

My ultimate goal at this point in time is to enjoy writing about the Internet while making people think.

“Making people think” means more people: more RSS subscribers and more StumbleUpon fans. Organic search traffic is nice and linked mainly to WordPress, and some of those visitors do community-style things like send me emails to say they’re coming back for more posts on other topics, so I’ll also continue writing the occasional snack topics like WordPress.

For starters on the deeper gist of the “think” in “making people think,” these are three of my favorite thinking topics:

  • Identity – Branding beyond logo and colors
  • Community – What sparks it and keeps it energized, online and locally, through social media and other kinds of venues, and any supportive roles that marketing can play
  • Culture – Specifically how the Internet can be a positive force of understanding and respect in this era of terrorism and military activism

Community keeps coming up as a part of what I want to do and talk about. Could opening up to guest posts about online identity, community and cultural relationships help to build a sense of community? In a few weeks that may be something to think about.

The “All About Me” Factor

Here’s a theory on the “Elizabeth stuff” I was obsessing about a few posts ago. I think that if content is quality, maybe it’s OK to put myself first, IF I am also respecting the reader: no trying to “sell” anyone on thinking or behaving how I would like. The value for me will be to be making a deeper contribution through writing about what fascinates me personally. The value for my readers will be there or it won’t. Without exploring the possibility, I won’t know.

I’ll think of it as starting at the top. I’ve got a built-in corner on keyword me, and I might as well see where it takes me. The longer I think it over, the longer I put keyword “me” on hold, and life is short and I am not. :)

Next: Blog Post Ideas for Challenging Industries

Jenn’s post for today will be “How to Come up with Blog Post Ideas for Challenging Industries.” LOL. I am so there. This week I’ll be following along again, as well as thinking through how to get my ideas from this post into more of a structured outline.

In case you, too, are interested in following along, I strongly recommend it as a way to re-think your own goals and self-imposed limitations. These are the topics that Jennifer will be posting at the Search Engine People Blog each Monday, throughout the five weeks of her series on Blog Strategy:

  1. How to Sell your Client on a Blog Strategy
  2. How to develop a Blog Strategy What makes it a ‘Strategy’ versus just implementing a Blog?
  3. How to Come up with Blog Post Ideas for Challenging Industries
  4. What are realistic measures of success for your Client’s Blog?
  5. How to get your Blog Traffic to Convert

A Quick First Look at WordPress 2.5

Yesterday WordPress 2.5 became the latest stable release. I upgraded… and it was good.

If you want to get a sneak peek before performing the deed yourself, head on over to the WordPress 2.5 announcement. You’ll see that wordpress.org has a fresh new look, and that fresh new look is also the look of WordPress 2.5’s back end. Yes it’s true, WordPress’s back end just got a major face lift. [insert rimshot and laugh track, please]

Seriously, it’s lovely, and as the announcement post above states, it’s epic. More on that later.

First, I have two cautions.

  1. Automatic Plugin Upgrades.

    This is slick. From Dashboard > Plugins you can choose to automatically update any plugins for which new versions are available. One click, and WordPress will deactivate a plugin, install the new version, and reactivate the freshly updated plugin.

    I test or use about 30 plugins, about half of which either had updates waiting for WordPress 2.5 or were previously in need of an update – I don’t always keep inactive plugins up to date. All but two made it through the automatic update process without a hitch. I’m not going to say which two, because I haven’t been able to reproduce the error. Those two that didn’t re-initialize vanished from the dashboard’s list of plugins, though their files were still visible via FTP.

    Before upgrading a plugin, write down which one you are working with. The first time you upgrade a plugin after a WordPress version change, it might be wise to forgo the automatic option.

  2. Redirect Problem.

    This one I haven’t yet figured out how to fix. On a WordPress-based site that is not yet public I had installed more than one plugin that does redirects. Before upgrading everything was fine. Since upgrading, I can get into the dashboard but the site itself gives me an error message about bad redirects: “Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.”

    Again, I’m not going to tell you which plugins are involved because I don’t want to point at the wrong culprit unless I am sure. I’d be tearing my hair out if this was a live site, or a site that I’d made for someone else. As it is, it’s not going to be live for another few weeks and by then all will be well.

The Good News

Changes are indeed epic. These are the most significant feature upgrades that rocked my boat.

  1. Concurrent Editing Protection

    Yes, WordPress grows up as a community support tool. Have you ever attempted to clean up a contributor’s article before posting, and had your changes overwritten because the author is working on the same post at the same time? Major pain in the patoo, let me tell ya.

    With WordPress 2.5 there is now concurrent editing protection. Now, if you open a post that someone else is editing, WordPress will lock it and prevent you from saving until the other person is done. It even serves up a self-explanatory error message. This feature would have been welcome the day WordPress as a multi-author tool was conceived. That it took until now is a mark of the relative newness of the concept of blogs as community.

  2. A Better WYSIWYG.

    WordPress 2.5 claims not to mess with your code anymore. I’ll believe that one when I can’t break it. For now, they get the benefit of the doubt and a big thumbs up. A better WYSIWYG will make blogging easier and more accessible to thousands of non-techie bloggers. Better cooperation between hands-on code and what WordPress “wants” will make techie arteests and wannababe coders like me happy. Power to the people!

  3. Automatic Plugin Updates.

    Other than my caution above, wow, this is slick. In the long run, automatic plugin upgrades will help us all keep our blogs safer and running more smoothly, because upgrading will be absolutely painless.

  4. More Better Security

    • Salted passwords — WordPress now uses the phpass library to stretch and salt all passwords stored in the database, which makes brute-forcing them impractical.
    • Secure cookies — cookies are now encrypted.
    • Password strength meter — when you change your password on your profile it’ll tell you how strong your password is to help you pick a good one. W00t.

Upgrade Success

All in all, upgrading was a pleasant and successful experience, much more than the move to WordPress 2.0. I am looking forward to getting to know my new WordPress installations.

Social Media: Can Broken be Better?

A while ago I noticed something slightly broken about the StumbleUpon toolbar. The send-to function doesn’t always make it all the way through to the recipient. It can take hours, or seem to vanish completely.

StumbleUpon Toolbar with sent page waiting
StumbleUpon Toolbar with a sent page waiting

Social Media, Social Testing

I got online with a few people I follow through StumbleUpon and sent some pages back and forth. Paul of North South Media was the first. We refreshed views, re-started browsers and rebooted to no avail, off and on over a few hours. Many hours later the pages started to trickle through. Paul was curious about what happens between different time zones, and at peak Internet use times. The commute between the west coast of the US where I am and the Scottish “back-back” where Paul lives shouldn’t be too awfully rough for a little digital blip between people who are not on dialup, but a mystery is a mystery and I was off to see what I could see.

I tried the same thing with Emory of Clickfire. Emory is in Georgia, only three time zones away. Some of our messages got through within twenty minutes or an hour, and some seemed to vanish until the next day. Better, but still mysterious.

My next willing victim was Moojj, also known as Adam of Adamant Solutions, creator of the StumbleUpon Alerter. Adam is a gazillion time zones away from me, in Australia. He did not believe that sent-to pages were getting lost somewhere. His theory was that if it seemed not to go through it was actually just not showing up for some reason.

Voila. We sent our pages to each other. I saw nothing. He saw nothing. He tried clicking on the “Stumble” button, and my page and message appeared. The same thing happened on my end. Mystery solved: the sent page is sent and received almost instantly, but if it’s stuck in the toolbar you won’t see any sign of it unless you push the Stumble button.

a sent Stumble arrives
Clicking on the Stumble button reveals a waiting page from Fatgadget2

When something doesn’t fit I start to wonder. This time I’m wondering if there are cases where less functionality is better. Does slowing down SU help keep it more civil and less competitive? More share-friendly?

Is Gently Broken Better?

Humor me for a minute. If users (and bots) had full access to who responded to a SU thumbs-up request and how long it took to get what kind of action from users with certain characteristics, would that make the users who are the most willing to be “nice” into targets for spammers? Yes, if bots got into the system, I think it would. Maybe, for the good of the users, some information is better off shrouded in unreliability… not too awfully shrouded to the point of bad usability for the devoted users, just gently broken here and there from the perspective of a marketer who is looking to do more using than joining in.

Leaving it a little bit broken makes taking the time to make a real human connection even more important. For instance, to get a screen shot of the incoming sent page I used above, I sent a pm to Fatgadget2. I am more likely to look at a page that comes from someone whose SU reviews I am subscribed to. Without a note, I would have seen who sent it, but getting it wouldn’t have felt as… human, especially if the page was lumped in with all the other Stumbles I could go to via the toolbar.

SU received page without a note
Received page without a note

Are there things about your favorite Social Media application that you would like to see ever so gently broken?

Server Problems

frustration smiley My server has been having ” intermittent problems” since the 18th of this month.

confused At first, because it would come and go, I thought I was having a problem with my Internet access.

oh horse poop After calling tech support and emailing ye old complaint department, I learned of their issues.

happy day They tell me that problem hardware was replaced yesterday and all should be well now.

Because this is the first time I have had problems with uptime in all the years I’ve used 1and1, I’m going to stick with them for a little while longer. Moving house after the problem is fixed doesn’t make sense. If it looks like all will not be well, I’ll be FTPing my bags to a new virtual location.

For those of you who have unsubscribed, please come back!

Passion as a Content Development Strategy

I’ve been reading and writing a lot about developing a personal sense of branding and identity since the first week of January. Before getting too busy with planned content generation for my new blog I wanted to feel out what matters to me on a gut level: inner mission first, then building a brand to connect the mission to the reader. Putting the colors of my curtains before the shape of my windows seemed backwards.

It’s been a little like traveling across country without a map, or imagining what I’d do as a trapeze artist, without a net. There is a strong attraction to staying safe and writing about facts that I already know. No matter how much I enjoy writing about what I already know, the goal was to go deeper than that. At times the going has been very, very slow.

Then, a few days ago I spotted Jennifer Osborne’s new series about blog strategy. I’m going to use it for re-fueling and re-assessing. The first post in the series, How to Sell your Client on a Blog Strategy, suggests making a list of potential categories and posts.

Coming up with post ideas is one of the Key Success Factor for your Blog. As such, before the final decision to launch is made; and before the Blog is built, we will brainstorm at least 30 ideas for future Blog Posts.

When implementing a Blog for our clients we often think of 7 to 10 potential categories for the posts then come up with 3 to 5 ideas for each category. This is important for two reasons. First, this exercise will help you (the client) to realize that there are hundreds of potential post ideas.

Jennifer Osborne

It took me a few days of hemming and hawing, but I eventually came up with a pretty long list. There were two kinds of ideas: those that are pure Elizabeth, and those that fit neatly into categories. Guess which felt like they fit my goal of building a personal brand? LOL.

Thinking Inside The Box

My easily categorized ideas are also more easily optimized for search, because they are connected with the kinds of topics and words that might come up in search. There are phrases I’ve been targeting that are starting to make my site show up on Yahoo and Google, because that phrase is mentioned in my posts. Because of Yahoo’s tendency to pay more attention to on-page factors, in Yahoo at this point you don’t need quotes around some phrases to find me in the top ten. I could keep chipping away at posts that contain various combinations of those terms, eventually building the kind of resource base that would get some nice inlinks, and then come up with a product to sell based on those terms.

Sounds sensible, yes?

Let’s take a trip back through time.

Enter Social Media

Also few months ago I had a nice little traffic spike from being Stumbled. It was fun.

I read about how social media traffic doesn’t convert and shouldn’t be trusted to give the same targeted results as search traffic, and then I got Stumbled again. Still fun. Fun is good. Fun helps me stay interested in what I’m doing. Besides, by reading other people’s Stumbles I was learning a lot and widening my exposure to new writers.

For a few weeks there I became a Stumbling fool. I kept reading. I made “friends” and friends. I read and I read. I kept bumping into “how to blog” posts that talked about finding and sticking with writing about your passion. I still thought it would be more reasonable to stick with the post ideas that are more easily optimized for search, though I fought myself less when I wanted to explore the “pure Elizabeth.”

Straight From the Heart

The thing is, my favorite posts are “Elizabeth” posts, the ones that don’t categorize or strategize easily. They’re about my curiosity and sense of humor. Some honor something that is important to me. I like the feeling of making myself think, or of making the reader think, or of entertaining myself and the reader while making us both think. How can I make something like that fit into categories and strategies for traffic and conversion?

Can these state-of-being posts get search traffic? Not much, so far. Maybe search traffic can be for later, or maybe the sense of intellectual connection I’m getting from spending a bazillion hours on StumbleUpon is enough for now. So far, StumbleUpon readers seem to like the me-being-me stuff just as much as the how-to posts.

What I need for myself right now might have more to do with finding my voice, with a side dish of community support — and lots and lots more reading.

About That List…

My first thought was to post it here, and I’m still thinking about that. The difficulty would be if I lose the drive to write a post after seeing someone else write something similar.

I’d be more comfortable sharing privately, with someone who is going through the same sort of thing. Is anyone who is reading this willing to put themselves in the same boat?

Sooo, about that list… there might be a lot of “Uncategorized” posts for a while. :-)

This Week’s Task: Developing a Blog Strategy

Before finishing this post I glanced ahead at the second post in Jennifer Osborne’s series – How to turn your Blog into a Blog Strategy. There are some solid directions in there about goals, objectives and outlining a detailed plan. I’ll avoid them for now, and first see what comes up over the next few days of living with my uncategorized list. By the time the third post in the series comes out in a week I’ll have dug into the points in post two.

In case you’re interested in following along, these are the topics that Jennifer will be posting at the Search Engine People Blog each Monday, throughout the five weeks of her series on Blog Strategy:

1. How to Sell your Client on a Blog Strategy
2. How to develop a Blog Strategy What makes it a ‘Strategy’ versus just implementing a Blog?
3. How to Come up with Blog Post Ideas for Challenging Industries
4. What are realistic measures of success for your Client’s Blog?
5. How to get your Blog Traffic to Convert

Are you re-branding or thinking about it? Let’s “talk.” Please leave a comment.

Personal Branding, Personal Connection

All branding that works is personal, because it makes some sort of personal connection.

Sometimes personal is manufactured. Betty Crocker was a creation that represented a corporate brand.

Sometimes, “personal” seems to spontaneously ooze from the people behind the brand. Joe and Mark, the two enterprising yard care teens who used to take care of my lawn are their own spontaneous brand.

Spontaneous Branding

Joe and Mark had a little time, access to a lawn mower, and the good fortune to live in a neighborhood where some of the population preferred to pay someone else to do the yard care. It also helped that the sidewalks were paved and level, as they didn’t have a car.

Joe and Mark were their own brand, spontaneously. They were everything you’d want from a pair of enterprising yard care teens: hard-working; charming; clean; dependable; provided a needed service at a reasonable rate, and they were reasonably happy and everyone wanted to give them cookies.

Their brand development and brand identity was pretty much to show up and be themselves while getting the job done. We should all be so lucky. On the other hand, as a business gets larger and more complex, there are more layers of everything. Showing up and being yourself while getting the job done requires certain accessories in order to grow. In Joe and Mark’s case, a truck would have been a deal-maker, a cornerstone. Even if they wanted to, their target market and business model didn’t allow for such a major expense. They could work, and work, and work and still not have enough saved up for a vehicle.

A Home Trench Advantage

One advantage of a small business person who lives in the trenches with their “target market” is that they aren’t insulated by whoever designs the focus groups. They truly know the target market. They may be the target market.

I used to know a small business developer who liked to buy struggling restaurants, one at a time. He’d work a place until it was in shape to sell, collect his profits, and move on to the next project. He had a policy of working every job in his current project for a few months, from polished meet and greet at the front of the house, to the back-back where he made a rather imposing dishwasher’s helper.

At it’s best, working and knowing every job in a restaurant helped him find potentials and fix problems, while making some sweat equity. At it’s worst, he could find himself with Joe and Mark’s problem: too close to the problem, too many jobs to do and no way to work hard enough to make a silk purse out of a diamond in the rough.

He had a feast or famine life.

Blog question: how many bloggers are too close to the problem, with too many jobs to do and no way to work hard enough to make a silk purse out of a diamond in the rough?

Responding, With a Face and a Name

There was a progression to the development of Betty Crocker that went something like this:

In 1921 a milling company created a name, “Betty Crocker,” to personalize responses to letters in which customers asked questions about baking. “Betty” was chosen for a friendly feel, and “Crocker” was the last name of a recently retired company director. For further personalization and authority, Betty Crocker’s signature was created from the most distinctive female employee’s signature.

The mood of the times was positive, with reservations, and women were busy.

  • 675,000 Americans had died in the Spanish Influenza epidemic of 1918.
  • The American troops of World War I returned home in 1919.
  • In 1920, The 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, giving women the legal right to vote.
  • The average work week was 47 hours in 1920.
  • Between 1900 and 1930, American women went from being 20% of the labor force, to about 25%.
  • A revolutionary product named Bisquick was invented in 1930.

Personal to Brand and Back Again

Now, I don’t know if the idea of user personas was used much in the 1920’s but it seems to me that Betty Crocker was an idealized version of a consumer persona. “Betty” was how the consumer of the time might want to see themselves.

The woman of the 20’s/50’s had a kitchen with new fangled electric mixers and other time savers, and could be in the market for time-saving food preparation mixes that would still preserve that touch of home-made goodness. The world was changing in a big way, at breakneck speed, and though anything seemed possible, sometimes a woman just wants to write to Mom for a recipe.

“Betty Crocker,” a name symbolic of the friendly and authoritative woman’s values of a busy home maker, is developed as a bridge between home-made goodness, Gold Medal Flour, and other General Mills products. General Mills refines and markets Betty Crocker as the name behind a line of cake mixes, cook books, and more. It works.

Today, “Betty Crocker” could almost be a blogger. She might need a serious makeover. Women in media haven’t been the same since I Love Lucy. Maybe a better “Betty” would be a Crocker grand-niece, a web developer who can whip up a mean organic falafel.

Perspective

I think that branding success is a circle, or many parts of a circle. At any point between product development and consumer purchase there can be an opportunity, a creative breakthrough, a logical conclusion, a paradigm possible when those involved see with more than one set of needs – some snag or smooth place that gives someone an idea – a willingness to get very, very close, paired with a long view. Betty had a very nice long view in 1921; today, not so much.

A figurehead persona for today might need to be a real person, or better yet a group of people with different backgrounds and perspectives… and I think it’d be cool if they blogged together, and indulged in a little social media. :-)

Examining Print Style Sheets

What is a print style sheet?
A print style sheet controls which parts of a web page print, with what formatting.
Why do I need one?
  • Most or all sidebar navigation is not needed to get the most out of a printed article. Anything that is best understood by clicking is probably superfluous.
  • Margins and floats may overlap or cut off the edges of content when a layout is used for a smaller space than indented.
  • The width of a printed page is narrower than a layout that displays comfortably in a widescreen monitor.
  • Stylishly small text that is readable in a monitor may be too small to read when printed. Try a comparison: print a page of your site, then hold a line of text next to the same line of text on the screen. If the print version is noticeably smaller, a significant number of readers will need to get up close and squinty to make use of the printout.
What’s the difference?
  • Take a look at three versions of What I’m doing Instead of Attending SES-NY. Image widths are the same in all three screen shots below. The width of the image represents the width of the text area of a printed page. Only the yellow portion is the actual article. The rest is blogroll, sidebar, and other parts that don’t need to go in a printed version.
  • The lefthand version, without a print style sheet, prints out at about 12 pages.
  • The right hand version, with a print style sheet, prints out at just under three pages.
  • The middle version uses a copy of the regular “screen” stylesheet, shrunk to fit the width of a printed page. The text is tiny.

No Print Style Sheet

No Print Style Sheet

Same as Screen CSS

Screen Shot

With Print Style Sheet

Print Stylesheet

What I’m Doing Instead of Attending SES-NY

Dazzlin Donna has inspired me. :)

…let’s pull this baby back to what I was originally talking about. Content. Giving users what they crave. Right…now we’re back. I’m going to spend a fair amount of time on just this one topic, and I’m going to give my visitors lots of content to quench their thirst for information as well as great graphics to please their visual souls. Once I’ve satisfied this craving, I’ll go back to the analytics reports to see if they are craving something else that I could provide more of. And that, my friends, is what I’m doing instead of going to the never-ending carousel of search conferences. What are you doing?

What I’m Doing Instead of Attending SES-NY

Here goes…

Getting Used to Writing More Small Posts

~ or ~

Perfectionism Gets a Day Off

If you’ve been reading me for a while, you know that I decided to start this blog in backwards mode. I am blogging about finding my brand before I consciously choose one. I am creating content before considering what I want that content to do, before considering my audience or who may be my intended audience. I am starting with “me.”

It’s hard! A to-do list based on actionable goals may look longer and heavier, (and use more big words – dontcha just love “actionable”??) but in reality, there is no substitute for a map.

Now, you’d think that the informality of how I decided to start this would mean that I’m already comfortable writing short, informal posts that help us keep in touch. Not so. I am a perfectionist. I am the worst kind of perfectionist: I procrastinate. Perfectionism plus procrastination equals paralysis, and don’t you forget it.

When I saw Donna’s post of today I knew what I had to do. Perfectionism gets a day off, and we’ll just see what happens next.

I Like Networking

Later today I’m meeting three different people from three different places in this great wild world of ours, online, in chat sessions, mainly to discuss projects. This happened because I like to brainstorm, we’re all on StumbleUpon, and seeds of ideas like the light of other ideas. One person talks to another, and another, and sometimes something very nice starts happening. It has nothing to do with trying to get the other guy to click on your widget. Repeat after me: there are enough clicks to go around.

If SU ever becomes a bot-infested quasi directory link farm I’ll be in that part of the trenches marked “community first,” wearing my brand evangelist hat and swinging the biggest stick I can get my hands on.

Writing About Print Style Sheets

This evening I’ll be putting the finishing touches on a tutorial about print style sheets. I’ll also install one here – LOL. If you don’t have a print style sheet yet you’re in good company. There are some pretty impressive blogs out there that either don’t have print style sheets or have really bad ones.

If you’re one of the Famous Few or just some lost blogging wannababe who’d like a clue or two, tune in here in a few hours, because this is EASY, folks. Quick and easy. I’ll have tips, 1-2-3 how-to’s, and cautions.

Making your own print style sheet should take under half an hour, unless you are both a raging perfectionist and have a lot of inline styling to futz with. If you’re totally unfamiliar with code, you may need more time. If you need help with that, leave comments here or head over to Cre8asite and send up a white flag. The theory is that my tutorials will help people who want to learn, and may need to figure out where the how-to books meet the blog template that’s in their hot little hands, right now, as is.

Caution: given that my “evening” can last until I go to bed at 2am the next morning, depending on your time zone you may not see my post about style sheets until tomorrow.

Road Testing Action Plans, as a community-building activity

This is new. On Monday Jennifer Osborne of Search Engine People started a five part series on blog strategy. Her first post was How to Sell your Client on a Blog Strategy. I’m going to take her plan and apply it to my blog. She’ll be posting weekly for another four weeks. At some point after her posts come out each Monday, I’ll blog about how I am applying her strategies.

The topics:

  1. How to Sell your Client on a Blog Strategy
  2. How to develop a Blog Strategy? What makes it a ‘Strategy’ versus just implementing a Blog?
  3. How to Come up with Blog Post Ideas for Challenging Industries
  4. What are realistic measures of success for your Client’s Blog?
  5. How to get your Blog Traffic to Convert

My reasons for doing this are many.

  • First and foremost, I encourage others to blog. They’ve got their own resistance that has nothing to do with mine. If I am putting my energy where my mouth is, I think it will help me help them.
  • Secondly, I like how Jennifer thinks and I think I can use the way she combines her ideas with pragmatic, “actionable” planning.
  • Third in line and probably the most meaty in the long run, I like how the web connects us, and this is a way to take that in and grow with it. I want to test and demonstrate my belief that the Internet has changed the way we can be community with each other. Creating a popular list of resources is “only” creating content. What happens next?

    IMHO, blogging is part of a communication revolution, in the sense of “The” revolution, the revolution to change the world that many were so hungry for in the 60’s.

First Things First

First I’m going for a walk. Though weather reports promised us two weeks of rain and cold, for some strange reason the sun is shining. I’m treating it like a reverse of that cartoon of the guy who always has a rain cloud over his head. This is my sunshine, baby, and I’m not going to stay inside and miss it.

………..

A p.s. for the two curious souls who wondered if my peas are sprouting: the answer is yes. Each of my six pots of possibilities is showing the heads and shoulders of several vigorous sugar snap pea sprouts. I can hardly wait until the leaves start to unfurl.

I Dream of Way Cool Blog Posts, but it’s not what you think

Soooo, at about 9:00 Friday evening I was working on a blog post, not this blog post, aaaand thought I’d take a little Stumble break before polishing it off. The next thing I knew it was after 1:00 am Saturday and I was in that twilight zone where a person wonders if they are awake or asleep. This poor pumpkin doesn’t do time change very well.

When I nodded off I had several open browser tabs. I’d fallen asleep in mid “oh what a cool post.” The Very Cool Stuff I’d been happily reading was just as cool when I woke up three hours later.

At this hour I’m not going to coffee up and finish the post. I won’t even tell you what it is going to be about. You’ll have to come back later and find out.

I will, however, share these tasty bits.

  • I fell asleep with my mouse highlighting the following lines from 41 Blog Success Tips from 10 Years of Blogging You Can Learn Today. Read it. Print it. Draw a sunny smiley face on it, and post it by your computer.

    Yummy, sensible and inspiring. From the page:

    • 6. Communicate fascination – If you love your subject then let your readers know, share your enthusiasm, make it contagious
    • 7. Write better – All of us can improve our writing but it takes effort and motivation
    • 8. Grow your experience – Do new things, broaden your horizons, stretch yourself
  • As I snoozed away, the post Are You a Maki or a Yaro? was open in another tab. It’s a good read about identity.
  • Want Credibility? Send a Signal is the last blog post I was reading in my sleep. My favorite lines are near the end, where he suggests that to get a buyer’s trust, a seller first has to give something. He relays a list of good “gives” that are more material than I what would have come up with. I’m more of a give-of-my-self person: I wouldn’t trust someone who wants to give me “material wealth” without also letting me get to know if I like them. Maybe my give-of-myself thang could be handled by number six below.
    • 1. Material Wealth
    • 2. Time & Energy
    • 3. Opportunity
    • 4. Power & Control
    • 5. Reputation & Prestige
    • 6. Safety & Well-Being
  • You might also enjoy my pre snooze Stumble, an Interview With Zenhabits Writer Leo Babauta in which Mr. Zen himself talks about his development as a blogger. Also a good read.
  • Stumble is fun. Sure, there are days when I don’t want to play, but there are also many times when my attitude about Stumble is pure “Beast needs brain food. Feed me.”

    I’ll babble on about Stumble later. Right now I’m going to sleep without setting the alarm: I’m sleeping in. :-)

Hey – I feel like a valiant blog-mom, because I provided good snacks to hungry blog-guests. LOL.

Next stop Zville.

More later, y’all. Read happy.

No Rest For The Dyslexic

Yesterday, or earlier today, or at some point before I got going this yesterday morning… scratch that. Starting over: I re-set my clock for daylight savings time. Or I thought I did. In reality, I set it an hour behind when I was supposed to set it an hour ahead – looked about the same to me.

I’m used to going to sleep at about 1-2:00 am, which at this moment also happens to be the “real” and correctly adjusted time. Until I discovered my error a few minutes ago, clock time at my house was set for two hours earlier. My brain knows I’m not here now. My body disagrees. My body wins. I’m going to write for some amount of time equal to less than two hours, and then head to sleep.

I’m inviting whoever reads these things to come along for a little trip inside my thought process.

Pea Planting Time

Ed Hume, regional gardening great, was on the TV exactly a month ago saying that early February is the perfect time to make a first planting of snap peas and garden peas in my area. The weather was uninspiring, to say the least. Sleet, wind, rain, more sleet and frozen sheets of goosh on the streets, and Ed said it’s time to plant the gems of my early Summer.

Sugar Snap Peas

These are last Summer’s sugar snap peas. Yummy!

I always want more peas, as early as possible, so I took Mr. Hume’s advice on trust. That day I bought seed and checked out the pots that had been stacked and waiting since last Fall. The very next day I planted the first peas. Six pots of possibilities now hang from my eaves; I see them every day and am encouraged.

Blogging is like that for me: I started on faith in uncertain weather. Before I started blogging here someone suggested I get going before I know where I want to end up, and use my explorations to build a readership that can support where I go with this in the future. Making content without a purpose or a target audience was counter intuitive, but “readership” sounded like “community,” and a few posts later the writing bug bit.

Blogging tonight is like that, too: the opportunity was different than the plan. I wanted to go to bed early(ish,) but life handed me a couple hours and I’m here getting this done instead, and I’m not obsessing about how to get creativity out of my tired turnip head and onto the page: I’m getting it done.

Have I turned a corner? Tomorrow I’ll dig up a couple peas and find out: if they’ve sprouted I’m on the right track. If not, I’ll need to look at if I’m just unlucky, or if I’m swimming against the current. As for the writing and identity-building I wanted, I feel like I’m making progress: I’ll know better after sorting through some seeds of ideas and ideals.

Solutions And Their Counterparts Are Everywhere

I like to grow my snap peas in hanging pots up and away from hungry slugs. Living in the Pacific Northwest means I get endangered native slugs, ravenous European interloper slugs, and small gray mountain climber slugs that I’ve regularly seen as much as four feet up off the ground.

Hanging my pots of peas doesn’t eliminate slugs; it does limit slug slime to whatever critters are already living in the dirt. Also, I know from previous experience with hanging pots that slugs tend to hide out in the damp dirt at the bottom, just inside the drainage holes. They commute from those holes, usually emerging at dusk, traveling up the outside of the pot to the foliage above. They’re not as good at climbing up and down a hanging vine, and slugs at eye level are easier to pick off and toss. Regular slug picking comes close to completely cutting out slug slime, which brings a nice, pesticide-free peace of mind to my treasured Summer morning snap pea munch.

Addressing any barrier to productivity is a little like moving slug picking up to eye level.

When natural conditions and goals don’t match up, barriers to achievement are like the sea over a sandcastle: something has to give. If natural conditions for growth are also natural conditions for undesirables, no amount of dedication and hard work will make the undesirable parts go away.

Find And Use The Flow

I can’t undo my error of setting the clock behind instead of ahead. I accept that I do that sort of thing sometimes. I chose to treat the outcome like a two hour bonus instead of a two hour setback, and I can sleep in tomorrow, whatever “tomorrow” is at this hour. This isn’t as much about having a positive attitude as it is about being an opportunist: I have been staking a claim.

I feel better now.

Good night, world. :-)